Crocheting Over the Ends

★★☆ - Improver

Once you've mastered the basics, it's time to start looking for ways to make dealing with those ends as easy as possible.  After all, they can mount up pretty quickly if you start changing your colours every row.

A great shortcut that you can use is to crochet over the ends as you go along.  I like to use this method as often as I can, because it does part of the work for you.  But it depends on the stitch pattern you are working.  You need a nice solid stitch so that the yarn doesn't show, like a solid granny square.

CROCHETING OVER THE ENDS:

You start as soon as you attach the new colour yarn.

Before you start making any stitches in your new colour, arrange your yarn ends together and lay them neatly over the stitches that you are about to work.

Keep these yarn ends in place and start to crochet as normal, working right over the yarns as if they were not there.  This will trap the yarn ends nicely into place.

 Once you've worked a few stitches, stop and give the yarn ends a bit of a tug.  This will make sure that they are laying nice and straight along the top of the stitches.  You don't want them to get all scrunched up and start poking out later.

This is also great for hiding the knot, if you changed colours using the 'tie a knot' method.

 Now, you can carry on working like this till you get to the very ends.  But that's a less secure way of dealing with them.

What I prefer to do is, once I've worked along about half the length of the ends, I simply fold them to the back of the work out of the way and then carry on with my crochet.

 At the end of the round (or row), I can then go back and deal with those two left over halves of the yarn ends by using either the 'weaving in' or 'doubling back' methods described in 'weaving in ends'.




HIDING THE KNOT:

Although this technique is best used when you have a nice solid row of stitches to hide the yarn ends under, as I mentioned above, I also use this method just as a handy way to hide the knot on regular granny squares too.

Work over the ends for the first few stitches.

Turn the work over and you'll see the knot at the back.

You can give those ends a little tug and the knot will disappear and you won't see it.

You can now let the ends dangle while you carry on with the rest of the row/round and come back and weave them in later.




Next Steps:

✽  Find out how to weave in the ends as you go